Rethinking Europe, post-Brexit

Like many of you, I have been glued to the news doing my best to digest a constant stream of Brexit articles and opinions. And I am sure many of you are thinking; how will my role on a U.S. campus, where I am tasked with thinking strategically about global engagement, change?

Looking for data on student mobility trends? The WonkHE team is on it with a look at E.U. students in the U.K. from 2014-15 using HESA data, noting that E.U. students make up an approximate 5.5% of the total U.K. student population, with 46,230 graduate and 78,435 undergraduate students. HESA, for those like me who might not have known, refers to the Higher Education Statistics Agency that collects, analyzes and disseminates quantitative information about the publicly-funded U.K. higher education sector.

U.S. universities and colleges may want to take particular note that the number of E.U. accepted applicants to U.K. institutions has been increasing rapidly in recent years, some 11% from 2014-2015 according to Ben Jordan, a Senior Policy Executive at UCAS. More intriguing, and strategically significant, are the countries demonstrating the highest growth over this period: Romania (+34%, 2,450 acceptances), Italy (+26%, 2,630 acceptances), Poland (+25%, 1,660 acceptances), Spain (+16%, 1,850 acceptances), and France (+16%, 3,060 acceptances).